Rebels will not attend peace talks

Thursday

May 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMMay 30, 2013 at 1:00 PM

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's main Western-backed opposition group said today it will not participate in U.S.-Russian sponsored peace talks on Syria while massacres are underway in the country, dealing a blow to international efforts to end the devastating civil war.

A spokesman for the Syrian National Coalition, Khalid Saleh, also said the group will not support any international peace efforts in light of Iran's and Hezbollah's "invasion" of Syria.

Saleh was referring to the increasingly prominent roles Iran and the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group have had in backing President Bashar Assad's forces on the ground.

The opposition's announcement came just a day after Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said the government would attend a planned peace conference in Geneva but laid out terms that made it difficult for the opposition to accept.

Al-Moallem said Assad will remain president at least until elections in 2014 and might seek another term, and also that any deal reached in such talks would have to be put to a referendum.

The Syrian National Coalition, the main exile-based political group, insists Assad must step down and be excluded from the political process.

"The talk about the international conference and a political solution to the situation in Syria has no meaning in light of the massacres that are taking place," Saleh told reporters in Istanbul, where the opposition has been holding week-long deliberations on a strategy for the Geneva talks.

The Coalition today launched an urgent appeal for relief efforts to rescue what it said were more than 1,000 wounded people in the Syrian town of Qusair, where Syrian troops backed by fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah group have been advancing against rebels for days.